Under the Right to Education (RTE) Act’s 25% reservation rule in private schools, the Gujarat Education Department has received 96,707 applications this year for 83,326 reserved seats.
Data gathered up until 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, when the online application process was shut down, showed that 7,449 applications were still being processed while 59,268 were approved. 11,605 applications have been turned down since the application process began on April 10. Data as of April 22 indicated that 18,385 applications had been cancelled in total.
Over 83,000 seats are reserved in 9,855 private schools in the state. A majority of these schools are in Gujarati medium. Last year, over 71,000 children were admitted to the schools in the state under the RTE provision. The schedule for admissions will be declared by the department in the coming days. However, the Gujarat Pradesh Youth Congress has demanded an application deadline extension of another 15 days.
“Every year, the period to apply is 15-20 days. But this year, it was only 12 days. As a result, there was a lot of congestion on the website and repeated incidents of the website crashing. Also, it takes time for parents to collect the documents required for admission. Keeping all these factors in view, we request you to allow another 15 days to apply,” the Gujarat Pradesh Youth Congress wrote to Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel on Sunday.
The education department has established a helpline for reporting complaints after receiving numerous reports of agents contacting parents to get their wards admitted and even offering to prepare phoney documents.
The education department recently reported to the police fake websites offering admission under the RTE Act.
The first FIR was registered in Gujarat in September 2021 against a beneficiary of the RTE Act for submitting false income certificates and false information to the state government. The student was admitted to Anand Niketan School in Class 1.